This Means War: Man vs. Machine

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Want to help market a company’s game server scaling technology set a world record for the simple fun of it? Man vs Machine will be taking place on January 29th, with the goal of bringing 1000 players and a hell of a lot of spider monsters into one epic hour long battle.

Trailer and more information about what to expect follows, just as long as our server hasn’t already joined the Machine side and decided to make this the first strike against humanity, in which case death, destruction and a lifetime of mining ore in the slave mines await.

(Phew!)

Well, it’s not the most awesome looking game, is it? Still, it’s a browser based shooter built on Unity, which is only due to be made available on a first-come, first-served basis, so awesome graphics, amazing depth, and lasers that obey the laws of physics actually might be a little too much to ask in this case. If you want to play, just visit the site on the day between 14.00 and 15.00 CET. No registration is needed, though you’ll obviously need to be quick.

Curious about the background to this war? Why? Why are you curious about that? It obviously doesn’t matter. Still, never mind. You can check it out in handy comic form, right here.

Something tells me if it wasn’t feasible, they wouldn’t be doing this. They certainly aren’t just taking a typical FPS and some basic netcode and hoping 1000 real-time FPS connections is going to work.

I’ve read papers on methods to get around this, you still have some problems with latency vs bandwidth, but I’ve seen 100+ players in a single game of quake, IBM did that as an experiment. Instead of just having a single server, you form a mesh between all the users and have a torrent like peer-to-peer network transferring traffic each direction as fast as you can.

“The technology running on the servers behind this is developed to remedy this exact problem. We have tested that our servers can cope with the load from the gameplay with uTsung. But we haven’t tested it with you guys just yet. As long as you have an Internet connection capable of downloading 32 KB/s the amount of lag you experience should mainly depend on your distance from Stockholm, Sweden, rather than the number of players in the game. Read more below about our Technology.”

I’ve met the team behind this when I was in Uppsala, in Sweden. They were working on a pretty kickass audio program when I was there, and I’ve been following this for a while. I have reason to believe this will work out just fine.